Gary Brown: Around the world with Monopoly

Vancouver? But I should start where it makes sense. Monopoly has gone global.

Gary Brown

Vancouver?

But I should start where it makes sense.

Monopoly has gone global.

The new Monopoly “Here & Now: The World Edition” offers players the chance to visit 22 cities. The “World Edition” enables players to “complete this pleasurable journey in just an hour or two.”

It’ll take even less time if people start landing on a Riga hotel, which takes the space of Park Place on the board.

That’s right, Riga. I don’t want to sound like a rude American, but suddenly a city in Latvia is exclusive?

Voters decide

Apparently, that’s how more than 5.6 million voters viewed it during the six-week online voting period. From a list of 70 cities worldwide, 22 were selected to be placed on the Monopoly game board.

Twenty cities were selected during initial voting. The cities of Montreal and Riga took up occupancy on the ritzy dark blue spaces. Cape Town, Belgrade and Paris were selected to be cities on the green spaces.

Jerusalem, Hong Kong and Beijing were placed on yellow spaces. London, New York and Sydney became red spaces. Vancouver, Shanghai and Rome took over orange spaces. Toronto, Kyiv and Istanbul are the magenta spaces. And Athens, Barcelona and Tokyo are the new board’s light blue.

The final two cities, chosen for the low-rent brown spaces in a bonus round of voting on the 20 top write-in cities, wound up being Taipei and Gdynia.

They’re the Baltic and Mediterranean avenues of the new Monopoly world order.

Which brings me to my main point: Canada gets three cities and the United States gets just one. New York. It’s a big bone to be thrown, but voters threw out Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Atlantic City apparently wasn’t even considered, and that’s the city on which Monopoly was based.

No offense to my Canadian friends and not to start an international incident, but ... ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Vancouver?

Calming down

For the sake of my sanity, I should offer some trivia about the new “World Edition.”

Ten of the cities on the new board have hosted Olympic games, which seems appropriate to note in the wake of the Beijing Olympics.

“Here & Now: The World Edition” will be sold in more than 50 countries and printed in 37 different languages. Canada hogs two of those languages, French and a form of English that includes the word “Ay.”

Only two countries have more than one city on the board: China, which is this huge world power, has three cities. And Canada, which plays a lot of hockey and makes good beer, somehow got three cities on there as well.

Vancouver? It’s way out west in Canada. Can you even get to “Go” from there?

It’s a done deal now, so Monopoly players will have to live with it. To be fair, I looked it up on the Internet and it says Vancouver is a great place to live. The pictures showed a terrific skyline and the city is said to have good schools, great art and high property values.